Chiara C. Rizzarda's Blog, page 7

Pride Month 2025 – Story of the Day

Veiled in Wit: Queer Subtext and Gender Play in The Heptameron

Often dubbed “the French Decameron,” The Heptameron is a collection of 72 stories told by a group of noble travellers, written by Marguerite Queen of Navarre, sister to King Francis I, and one of the most brilliant literary figures of the French Renaissance. Framed as moral tales of love and human folly, these stories contain bold meditations on desire, betrayal, gender, and power, told through the rotating voices of men and women.

While many of the tales depict heterosexual relationships, others hint at more complex emotional geometries. Of particular interest to queer readers is the space Marguerite creates for same-gender intimacy between women, especially through the voices of characters like Parlamente and Longarine. These female narrators share stories – and sometimes subtle desires – that emphasise emotional exclusivity, romantic jealousy, and intimate companionship among women, couched in the language of virtue and friendship.

In one tale (Story 55), a lady becomes obsessed with the beauty and purity of another woman, visiting her daily, lavishing her with attention, and expressing a devotion that borders on infatuation. Though the story ends with disillusionment (the beloved turns out to be cunning and cruel), it suggests a world in which same-gender longing is plausible, narratable, and emotionally real.

The Heptameron also queers power dynamics: women often control the storytelling, critique male hypocrisy, and assert erotic agency, subtly undermining Renaissance gender norms even while appearing to reinforce them.

Pride Month 2025 – Words of the Day

Not by Nature, but by Habit: Christine de Pizan and the Complexity of Gender Roles

“If it were customary to send little girls to school and teach them the same subjects as boys are taught, they would learn just as well… Not because they are female, but because they are not taught, women are thought incapable.”
— Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405)

At the dawn of the 15th century, Christine de Pizan stood alone among the scribes and scholars of the French court. Widowed and self-taught, she became the first woman in Europe known to earn her living by writing. Her texts – part allegory, part polemic – dared to argue not only for the education of women, but for a radical reconsideration of gender itself as a social construct.

In The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine stages a conversation with three personified virtues – Reason, Rectitude, and Justice – who instruct her to build an imaginary city to house the stories and worth of women. It is a visionary act of reclamation, but also one of subtle subversion. Her critique of misogyny goes further than defence: she dismantles the idea that women are inherently less rational, less moral, or less capable.

In doing so, Christine touches on something that would not be formally articulated for centuries: that gender is learned, performed, and enforced, not fixed by nature. Her call for education, representation, and reimagining the feminine role within civic and intellectual life forms an early blueprint not only for feminism but for gender-expansive thought.

Though her language is shaped by the moral and religious norms of her time, her questions echo across eras: who gets to define womanhood? Who benefits from that definition? And how might other ways of being – of knowing, of writing, of imagining – remake the world?

Pride Month 2025 – Story of the Day

The Sword and the Stage: La Maupin, the Scandalous Virtuosa of Baroque France

Julie d’Aubigny, better known as La Maupin, was a French opera singer, expert swordswoman, and outlaw who lived as boldly as the heroines she portrayed. Born into a noble family and trained at court, she eloped as a teenager, took up fencing, and began performing dressed in men’s clothing, while seducing both women and men across France.

Her romantic exploits are the stuff of legend: rescuing a young nun from a convent (after burning the building to cover their escape), duelling multiple noblemen in one night, and defying laws that criminalised same-sex relationships. Yet she was also a celebrated mezzo-soprano, starring at the Paris Opéra and gaining the king’s pardon more than once thanks to her unmatched voice and court connections.

La Maupin didn’t just defy gender roles: she dismantled them. She lived as both man and woman, lover and fighter, divine singer and social scandal. Her wardrobe, her duels, her lovers, and her roles all blurred the boundaries of identity in ways that made her a queer icon avant la lettre.

Pride Month 2025 – Words of the Day

As Blossoms Fall: The Poetry of Ephemeral Love in Nanshoku Ōkagami

“Their sleeves were soaked with tears, not from shame, but from knowing they had only this one night. In the garden, plum blossoms were falling—each petal a sigh, each gust a farewell.”
— Ihara Saikaku, The Great Mirror of Male Love (Nanshoku Ōkagami) 1687

Ihara Saikaku’s Nanshoku Ōkagami is a collection of short tales that immortalise the romantic, sexual, and emotional bonds between adult men and wakashū (adolescent youths) in the flourishing urban culture of Edo-period Japan. Unlike many Western texts of its time, it doesn’t condemn or suppress these relationships: it celebrates them as expressions of loyalty, sacrifice, and even spiritual beauty.

The selected fragment is from one of the more tragic love stories, where a samurai and his beloved must part after a fleeting but intense encounter. The language is rich with natural metaphor: falling plum blossoms, damp sleeves, the passing of a single night. These motifs, common in classical Japanese literature, are used here to encode both the sorrow and sanctity of male-male love.

Far from marginal or hidden, nanshoku was woven into theatre, poetry, and everyday life in 17th-century Japan. Saikaku wrote with nuance and respect, offering portraits of queer love that were as complex, tender, and socially embedded as any heterosexual counterpart.

Anatomy of a Space: Maria Helena Vieira da Silva in Venice

From April 12 to September 15, 2025, Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection hosts the richly evocative solo exhibition Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Anatomy of Space (Anatomia di uno spazio in Italian), curated by Flavia Frigeri, an art historian from London’s National Portrait Gallery. Featuring around seventy major works on loan from prestigious institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim New York, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and prominent private galleries, this exhibition offers an in-depth exploration of Vieira da Silva’s visual vocabulary.

A Portuguese-born artist who made Paris her artistic base, Vieira da Silva (Lisbona, 1908 – Parigi, 1992) became renowned for her innovative manipulation of pictorial space, melding abstraction with figuration to create labyrinthine, spatial illusions. Her work is richly infused with diverse influences: from Portuguese decorative traditions and urban landscapes to avant-garde movements like Cubism and Futurism. The exhibition traces her journey from the 1930s through the 1980s, spotlighting key periods including her formative years in Paris and her wartime exile in Rio de Janeiro alongside her husband, fellow artist Árpád Szenès.

Significantly, Vieira da Silva holds a longstanding connection to Peggy Guggenheim herself: she was one of the thirty-one women featured in Guggenheim’s groundbreaking 1943 show Exhibition by 31 Women at Art of This Century in New York, and earlier in 1937, Hilla Rebay (the Guggenheim Museum’s founding director) acquired her work Composition (1936), now in the Guggenheim’s permanent collection. Upon closing in Venice, the show will travel to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in autumn 2025.

This presentation, ambitious in scope and richly curated, illuminates Vieira da Silva’s enduring legacy: her ability to conjure immersive, abstracted realms where memory, architecture, and emotion converge. It invites viewers to consider space not merely as backdrop, but as the very subject of her artistry, a dynamic, living element testifying to the penetrating vision of a truly modern master. Let’s see what it’s about.

1. Painting Space: the Intimate Geometry of Vieira da Silva

“I love painting space.” With this simple yet profound declaration, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva invites us into the heart of her artistic vision: a lifelong, passionate pursuit of the intangible; space in all its guises, real and imagined. For her, painting space was not a matter of perspective or geometry alone, but of emotion, intuition, and memory. Two formative encounters in her youth — seemingly incidental, but in hindsight almost prophetic — set the foundation for this obsession.

The first came in 1926, in Lisbon, where a teenage Vieira da Silva enrolled in an anatomy course at the Escola de Belas Artes. There, she found herself mesmerised not by the figure as a whole, but by its inner scaffolding. “I drew hundreds,” she later recalled of her studies of the human skeleton. These were not dry academic sketches, but the beginning of a deeper fascination with structure—an interest that would eventually migrate from bone to architecture, from body to space. Works like Composition (1936) and The Weavers (1936) aren’t just experiments in abstraction; they are meditations on the skeleton of space itself. She speaks of her paintings as if navigating unknown terrain: “I walk through spaces where I’ve never known how to see, and which I am building as I go.” To look at them is to peer into a space mid-construction, at once delicate and determined.

The second revelation occurred in 1931, in Marseille, beneath an iron bridge in the old port. There, amidst the interplay of steel and sea breeze, Vieira da Silva experienced a revelation: space could flow. It could be as elusive as light, as ephemeral as a breeze. The encounter inspired her painting The Bridge in Marseille (1931), a work that captures not just the physical structure, but the shimmering weightlessness of air suspended between beams. It’s not just a bridge: it’s a metaphor for suspension, for transition, for the spaces that connect more than they separate.

These experiences — anatomy and architecture, bone and bridge — crystallised a unique way of seeing. Vieira da Silva didn’t depict space. She dissected it. She reimagined it as a living organism: a place of passage, of construction, of interiority. Her art was never content to merely reproduce the visible world. Instead, it asked: how do we feel space? How do we move through it, get lost in it, or — perhaps most radically — build it with our own eyes?

In the first room, we begin to understand Vieira da Silva not only as a painter of spaces but as an architect of the invisible, a cartographer of the mind’s eye.

2. Checkmate: Dancers, Chess Players, and Card Games

In one of the most perceptive readings of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s work, the Belgian critic and painter Michel Seuphor described her canvases as “spaces without dimensions that are at once finite and infinite, hallucinatory mosaics where each element contains an inner force that immediately transcends its own substance.” Nowhere does this paradox sing more clearly than in the works gathered in the second room: vibrant scenes populated by dancers, chess players, and figures immersed in card games, their gestures half-hidden within webs of painted squares. Possibly my favourite section.

At first glance, it all appears decorative: a kaleidoscope of tiny adjacent tiles, lovingly rendered with obsessive care. But let your eyes adjust to the logic of this language, and motion begins to emerge. Vieira da Silva builds her worlds out of countless interlocking squares: minuscule gestures that, when layered, shimmer with life. The colour palette is playful and dense: reds, greens, inky blues, and muted whites pulse like the tesserae of ancient mosaics or the hand-painted tiles of Lisbon’s azulejos. But here, they dance.

In Dance (1938) and Ballet of the Architects (1946), the dancers don’t move through space: they are the space. Their limbs merge with the planes around them, as if they were being folded into a breathing architecture. Each brushstroke flattens and deepens, like ripples meeting across the surface of a tiled fountain. Nothing is static. These paintings don’t depict scenes; they stage sensations. The ground becomes a tide. Walls sway. Figures flicker in and out of focus.

And then come the chessboards. Here, Vieira da Silva builds allegories for strategy, conflict, repetition. The players are locked into patterns, bound by a logic both orderly and mysterious. Each move echoes a decision made in the painting’s very structure. Cards are drawn. Pieces are pushed. The game, like the composition, is in a state of perpetual becoming.

In a rare personal insight, Vieira da Silva once explained that she preferred painting on large canvases using thin brushes, an approach she likened to tilework, embroidery, and even lace-making. This meticulous slowness gave her the rhythm she needed: “that rhythm,” she said, “is what gives life to what I seek. It allows me to find the heartbeat of a painting.”

3. The Second World War, seen from Rio de Janeiro

“I was afraid to stay in France after war was declared… I was panicking at the thought they might arrest Árpád.” With these words, Vieira da Silva distilled the terror that took hold of her life in 1939: the anxiety born of her Jewish husband’s background, of her own uncertain national identity, and of the rising shadow of persecution. When war erupted, she and Árpád Szenes left Paris and returned to Lisbon, hoping to reclaim Portuguese citizenship (lost after her marriage) and to avoid the growing danger. But their efforts to secure safety in Europe failed, and in June 1940, they boarded a ship bound for Rio de Janeiro.

What followed was anything but a tropical idyll. For Vieira da Silva, the move to Brazil was marked by emotional hardship: the suffocating heat, the weight of fear for family members left behind in war-torn Europe, and the silent, ever-present anguish over what was happening far away. Yet Rio also gave her something else, a different kind of distance. One that allowed her to explore new spaces, both psychological and pictorial. She and Szenes moved in intellectual circles, forging deep personal bonds with poets like Cecília Meireles and Murilo Mendes. “Great friendships were formed,” she later remembered, “but when it came to our work, we realised we couldn’t collaborate. So we each kept painting.” Their artistic paths diverged: Árpád began teaching, while Vieira da Silva immersed herself entirely in her painting practice. And what a creative flowering it was.

The works produced during this Brazilian exile are among the most profound in Vieira da Silva’s career. In them, humanity appears suffocated by grid-like architectures, as in The Encircled Men (1938), a harrowing forewarning of entrapment and surveillance. Later works, like The Garden of Rio (1944), burst forth with life, colour, and the chaotic exuberance of survival. The contrast is striking: in one, anguish and enclosure; in the other, vitality and resistance.

In these paintings, Vieira da Silva doesn’t illustrate events but absorbs them. Her lines become wounds, her brushstrokes, breaths. The war is never directly depicted, and yet it looms in every structure, every face, every spatial fold. In a place far from the frontlines, she paints an emotional geography of exile: where light is tropical but the shadows are European, where joy and horror lie side by side.

Above all, these canvases carry the pulse of someone struggling not just with displacement, but with the question of how to go on. Her work in Rio is a testament to the quiet, persistent labour of survival: not just bodily, but spiritual, visual, and artistic. A heartbeat faint but unbroken.

4. Cities, Real and Imagined

“I am a woman of the city,” Vieira da Silva once declared, and it’s a statement that resounds through every period of her life and practice. Cities were not just her places of residence: they were her intellectual ecosystems, her muses, her cartographies of thought. From Lisbon to Paris, from Rio de Janeiro back to postwar Europe, cities shaped not only how she lived, but how she painted, how she saw.

When Vieira da Silva returned to Paris after the war, she returned with new eyes. Her cityscapes became more than portraits of specific places: they transformed into meditations on what a city is, and what it means to inhabit one. Some works, like Festa veneziana (1949), evoke recognisable locations like Venice, rendered as a triumphant cascade of blues, evanescent and fluid like water itself. Others, like Paris (1951), with its frenzied latticework of intersecting lines, seem to pulse with metropolitan energy, bordering on abstraction.

But even when the city has a name, it may not be a map you can follow. Paris, la nuit (1951) offers a nocturnal mirage of the “City of Light,” more dream than document. In The City at Night and the Lights of the City (1950), the glow becomes almost spiritual, a ghost of lived experience. Conversely, in The Tentacular City (1954) and Figures in the Street (1948), Vieira da Silva captures something closer to urban alienation: the repetition, the static, the inescapable rhythm of anonymous crowds. These are cities stripped of landmarks. Cities where meaning is buried in routine.

One of the most striking pieces of this section is The City of the Staircases (1954), painted during a time of reconstruction and reinvention in Europe. It evokes a city that doesn’t quite exist: a metropolis without cars, floating upward in blue shafts of imagined light. “I think of an immense metropolis without automobiles,” she wrote, “where people move using only stairs and elevators. Not a gigantic skyscraper, but an architecture that rises softly, gently, into the blue.”

Here, we see how cities, for Vieira da Silva, become spaces of paradox: at once physical and imaginary, oppressive and liberating, ordered and chaotic. They are not backdrops, but characters—perhaps even autobiographical. In painting the city, she paints her place in it. In abstracting the city, she constructs a psychic architecture where personal history and collective space merge.

This section of the exhibition doesn’t just show us where Vieira da Silva lived—it lets us step into the cities she invented. And in doing so, it offers us the chance to get lost — joyfully, curiously — in her most enduring subject: the geometry of belonging.

5. Grand Constructions

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s love for cities naturally extended to the buildings that compose them. In this section, we move from the cityscape to its structural skeletons: four paintings that focus on the idea of construction, not as finished architecture, but as process, scaffolding, and transformation. Two of the works, both titled Construction Site (1950), depict building sites not through architectural precision, but through evocative overlays of poles, grids, and tangled frameworks. There’s something almost musical about them: structures seen mid-growth, like fugues in concrete and steel.

In Gare Saint-Lazare (1949), an actual, completed Parisian train station becomes almost unrecognisable: dismantled and reassembled into a woven labyrinth. The composition denies clarity, insisting instead on complexity. Likewise, in The Gothic Chapel (1951), linear rigour gives way to baroque convolution. Lines curve and fold like ribs in a vaulted ceiling, evoking Gothic architecture not in form, but in spirit: elaborate, reverent, and a little haunted.

Critics have long noted Vieira da Silva’s affinity for architecture, and her husband Árpád Szenes confirmed it. But her vision went beyond buildings: she painted urbanism, space as social matrix, as experience. From the late 1940s through much of the 1950s, Vieira da Silva turned her brush to interiors and exteriors alike. What emerged wasn’t so much a depiction of architecture, but a reinvention of it.

These paintings explore spatial immensity through colour as much as line. Blues stretch, reds collapse, yellows pulse like beacons in a sea of grey. Sometimes her compositions feel dense and claustrophobic, other times airy and skeletal. In every case, they propose a new kind of architecture, born out of memory, intuition, and abstraction.

By the mid-1950s, Vieira da Silva’s architecture of the mind had become internationally recognised. Her spatial paintings were exhibited across the globe, from Lisbon to New York, Paris to Stockholm, and twice at the Venice Biennale (1950 and 1954), where she stood as a rare woman in a field still dominated by men. These great constructions are not just about what buildings are, but they ask what they could be. They frame architecture as an idea in flux, a choreography of lines, a place to think, to feel, and ultimately, to lose oneself in.

6. Labyrinth

The following room brings together some of the most representative works from Vieira da Silva’s career during the 1960s and 1970s. The tones are more subdued, the formats often larger, yet despite the change in scale and palette, one essential constant remains: the labyrinth.

From her earliest works to these more monumental canvases, Vieira da Silva was enthralled by rhythmic grids, tangled paths, and the ever-shifting interplay between line and space. The labyrinth, in her hands, was a philosophy, a way of seeing, a way of being.

Paintings such as The Barrier (1968) and The Man’s Path (1969) present checkerboard constructions that no longer trap the eye but instead offer openings, zones of visual relief and imaginary depth. These spaces are mental terrains where inside and outside blur, where time folds in on itself, where distance becomes immeasurable.

The 1975 work Daedalus makes the metaphor explicit. Named for the mythical architect of the labyrinth, it anchors this room conceptually. “I think I’ve lived my whole life inside labyrinths,” Vieira da Silva once confessed. “It’s how I look at the world.” From childhood, she felt drawn to complex spaces: intricate, impenetrable environments where progress was both possible and uncertain. Once you enter, she believed, the labyrinth becomes part of you. And yet, there is no fear in this wandering. By the time we reach these mature works, the labyrinth no longer imprisons. It invites. It becomes a metaphor not for entrapment, but for life itself: its twists and returns, its unknowable rhythms, the layers of memory and time it demands us to trace again and again. This final transformation is perhaps her most poignant: the labyrinth as a tool of remembrance. For Vieira da Silva, time was not linear, and memory was never simply a recollection of the past. It was spatial, vivid, alive. “Memory,” she wrote, “is like a wall that doesn’t divide the past from the present—but lets the past remain present.”

In these works, then, the artist becomes not just a painter of space, but a cartographer of memory. Each canvas is a path traced backwards and forward at once, asking not “Where are we?” but “Where have we been, and how do we carry it with us?”

7. Shades of White

This final room is a quiet, luminous tribute to the full arc of Vieira da Silva’s artistic journey: a retrospective within the retrospective. It gathers works from different periods of her career, all unified by a single element: the colour white.

At first, it might seem unexpected. Vieira da Silva is known for her masterful use of colour: deep reds, radiant blues, vibrant yellows, and brooding blacks dominate much of her work. The paintings displayed throughout the exhibition show how she orchestrated colour like a composer, layering harmonies. And yet, white—neutral, elusive—holds just as much power in her visual language.

In her later years, she increasingly turned to white, using it not as absence, but as fullness. Not as blankness, but as presence. These white-inflected works seek a kind of silence — a meditative stillness — where the noise of colour falls away and what remains is light. Space. Breath. Her partner, Árpád Szenes, once summarised this approach with piercing clarity:

“The problem of color is fascinating… In 1932 we started an experiment: to find every possible tone of white… all the shades needed so that the white would never remain an empty space, but a pictorial and plastic entity in itself. The intensity of color is only there to express the vibration of light. The importance of light is immense.”

White, for Vieira da Silva, was never sterile. It shimmered with nuance, it held memories, it carried a kind of transcendent vibration. This final room, then, becomes a chapel of sorts, dedicated to distillation and essence. It reminds us that in her search for space, Vieira da Silva was always reaching not just for new structures, but for clarity—for a place where light and thought converge. It is a luminous farewell. And like the best endings, it feels more like a beginning.

Recommended to…

…anyone who has ever been fascinated by the silent architecture of thought, and those who find poetry in grids and mystery in repetition. It will resonate deeply with lovers of modern art, of course, but also with architects, urban wanderers, and those drawn to the invisible structures that shape our lives. Whether you’re discovering Vieira da Silva for the first time or returning to her intricate worlds with familiarity, Anatomy of Space offers a quiet revelation into the production of this artist, and invites the patient viewer to lose themselves — and perhaps to find something — within her luminous, labyrinthine vision.

Pride Month 2025: Art of the Day

In the Courtyard at Dusk: Female Intimacy in Mughal Miniature Painting

In the world of the Mughal court, the zenana was a secluded space that offered elite women both constraint and community. Mughal miniature paintings often depicted moments of leisure among women: dressing, reading poetry, making music. And sometimes, physical closeness that shows intimate bonds.

This particular image captures a moment of domestic tenderness, where the physical touch and locked gaze between the two women feels intimate, deliberate, and quietly transgressive. In the aesthetics of Indo-Persian painting, love was often represented through metaphor: gestures, setting, and repetition. While male-male intimacy was sometimes more explicitly discussed in Persian poetry, female-female desire had to be encoded in shared rituals, lingering touch, and the suggestive intimacy of private space. Some Mughal texts and court poetry celebrate sakhiyan (female companions) who shared beds, secrets, and lifetime bonds. In painting, these dynamics are rendered not through drama, but through gesture and gaze: the soft alignment of bodies, the half-smile, the offered hand.

Such images functioned not as documentation, but as cultural permission slips—allowing patrons and artists alike to imagine and aestheticise same-gender love in the frame of courtly refinement. This miniature reminds us that queer female desire was not absent from Renaissance-era visual culture beyond Europe. In the palaces of Mughal India, women found ways to express emotional and possibly romantic intimacy, not through open declarations, but through shared softness, poetic metaphor, and visual code. It reminds us that queer female intimacy is not found in transgression or promixuity, as modern aesthetics seeks to undermine it: it exists in softness, in ritual, in proximity. In Mughal art, same-gender closeness between women is not always veiled. Sometimes, it is simply there, resting on cushions in a garden, lit by the fading light of a courtyard at dusk.

Werewolves Wednesday: The Wolf-Leader (17)

A werewolf story by Alexandre Dumas père.

Chapter XVII: The Baron de Mont-Gobert

Thibault found himself in the Countess’s room. If the magnificence of Bailiff Magloire’s furniture rescued from the lumber-room of his Highness the Duke of Orleans, had astonished Thibault, the daintiness, the harmony, the taste of the Countess’s room filled him with intoxicating delight. The rough child of the forest had never seen anything like it, even in dreams; for one cannot even dream of things of which we have no idea.

Double curtains were drawn across the two windows, the one set of white silk trimmed with lace, the other of pale china blue satin, embroidered with silver flowers. The bed and the toilet table were draped to match the windows, and were nearly smothered in clouds of Valenciennes lace. The walls were hung with very light rose-coloured silk, over which thick folds of Indian muslin, delicate as woven air, undulated like waves of mist at the slightest breath of air from the door. The ceiling was composed of a medallion painted by Boucher, and representing the toilet of Venus; she was handing her cupids the various articles of a woman’s apparel, and these were now all distributed, with the exception of the goddess’s girdle.

The central medallion was surrounded by a series of panels, on which were painted supposed views of Cnidos, Paphos, and Amathus. All the furniture, chairs, armchairs, settees, sociables, was covered with China satin similiar to that of the curtains; over the groundwork of the carpet, of the colour of pale green water, were scattered bouquets of blue corn-flowers, pink poppies, and white daisies. The tables were of rose-wood; the corner-pieces of Indian lacquer; and the whole room was softly lighted by pink wax candles held in two candelabra. A vague and indescribably delicate perfume pervaded the air, one could not say from what sweet essence, for it was scarcely even a perfume, but rather an emanation, the same kind of odorous exhalation whereby Eneas, in the
Eneid, recognised the presence of his mother.

Thibault pushed into the room by the waiting-maid, made one step forward, and then stopped. He had taken everything in at a glance, inhaled everything at a breath. For a second there passed before his mind’s eye like a vision, Agnelette’s little cottage, Madame Polet’s dining-room, the bed-chamber of the Bailiff’s wife; but they disappeared as quickly to give place to this delicious paradise of love into which he had been transported as by magic. He could scarcely believe that what he looked upon was real. Were there really men and women in the world, so blessed by fortune as to live in such surroundings as these? Had he not been carried to some wizard’s castle, to some fairy’s palace? And those who enjoyed such favour as this, what special good had they done? what special evil had they done, who were deprived of these advantages? Why, instead of wishing to be the Baron for four and twenty hours, had he not wished to be the Countess’s lap-dog all his life? How would he bear to be Thibault again after having seen all this? He had just reached this point in his reflections, when the dressing-room door opened and the Countess
herself appeared, a fit bird for such a nest, a fit flower for such a sweet scented garden.

Her hair, fastened only by four diamond pins, hung down loosely to one side, while the rest was gathered into one large curl that hung over the other shoulder and fell into her bosom. The graceful lines of her lithe and well-formed figure, no longer hidden by puffings of dress, were clearly indicated beneath her loose pink silk gown, richly covered with lace; so fine and transparent was the silk of her stockings, that it was more like pearl-white flesh than any texture, and her tiny feet were shod in little slippers made of cloth of silver, with red heels. But not an atom of jewellery no bracelets on the arms, no rings on the fingers; just one row of pearls round the throat, that was all, but what pearls! worth a king’s ramsom!

As this radiant apparition came towards him, Thibault fell on his knees; he bowed himself, feeling crushed at the sight of this luxury, of this beauty, which to him seemed inseparable.

“Yes, yes, you may well kneel kneel lower, lower yet kiss my feet, kiss the carpet, kiss the floor, but I shall not any the more forgive you … you are a monster!”

“In truth, Madame, if I compare myself with you, I am even worse than that!”

“Ah! yes, pretend that you mistake my words and think I am only speaking of your outward appearance, when you know I am speaking of your behaviour … and, indeed, if your perfidious soul were imaged in your face, you would verily and indeed be a monster of ugliness. But yet it is not so, for Monsieur, for all his wickedness and infamous doings, still remains the handsomest gentleman in all the country round. But, come now, Monsieur, ought you not to be ashamed of yourself?”

“Because I am the handsomest gentleman in the neighbourhood?” asked Thibault, detecting by the tone of the lady’s voice that his crime was not an irremediable one.

“No, Monsieur, but for having the blackest soul and the falsest heart ever hidden beneath such a gay and golden exterior. Now, get up, and come and give an account of yourself to me.”

And the Countess so speaking held out a hand to Thibault which offered pardon at the same time that it demanded a kiss.

Thibault took the soft, sweet hand in his own and kissed it; never had his lips touched anything so like satin. The Countess now seated herself on the settee and made a sign to Raoul to sit down be side her.

“Let me know something of your doings, since you were last here,” said the Countess to him.

“First tell me, dear Countess,” replied Thibault, “when I last was here.”

“Do you mean you have forgotten? One does not generally acknowledge things of that kind, unless seeking for a cause of quarrel.”

“On the contrary, dear friend, it is because the recollection of that last visit is so present with me, that I think it must have been only yesterday we were together, and I try in vain to recall what I have done, and I assure you I have committed no other crime since yesterday but that of loving you.”

“That’s not a bad speech; but you will not get yourself out of disgrace by paying compliments.”

“Dear Countess,” said Thibault, “supposing we put off explanations to another time,”

“No, you must answer me now; it is five days since I last saw you; what have you been doing all that time?”

“I am waiting for you to tell me, Countess. How can you expect me, conscious as I am of my innocence, to accuse myself?”

“Very well then! I will not begin by saying anything about your loitering in the corridors.”

“Oh, pray, let us speak of it! how can you think, Countess, that knowing you, the diamond of diamonds, was waiting for me, I should stop to pick up an imitation pearl?”

“Ah! but I know how fickle men are, and Lisette is such a pretty girl!”

“Not so, dear Jane, but you must understand that she being our confidante, and knowing all our secrets, I cannot treat her quite like a servant.”

“How agreeable it must be to be able to say to one’s-self ‘I am deceiving the Comtesse de Mont-Gobert and I am the rival of Monsieur Cramoisi!'”

“Very well then, there shall be no more loiterings in the corridors, no more kisses for poor Lisette, supposing of course there ever have been any!”

“Well, after all, there is no great harm in that.”

“Do you mean that I have done some thing even worse?”

“Where had you been the other night, when you were met on the road between Erneville and Villers-Cotterets?”

“Someone met me on the road?”

“Yes, on the Erneville Road; where were you coming from?”

“I was coming home from fishing.”

“Fishing! what fishing?”

“They had been drawing the Berval ponds.”

“Oh! we know all about that; you are such a fine fisher, are you not, Monsieur? And what sort of an eel were you bringing back in your net, returning from your fishing at two o’clock in the morning!”

“I had been dining with my friend, the Baron, at Vez.”

“At Vez? ha! I fancy you went there mainly to console the beautiful recluse, whom the jealous Baron keeps shut up there a regular prisoner, so they say. But even that I can forgive you.”

“What, is there a blacker crime still,” said Thibault, who was beginning to feel quite reassured, seeing how quickly the pardon followed on the accusation; how ever serious it appeared at first.

“Yes, at the ball given by his Highness the Duke of Orleans.”

“What ball?”

“Why, the one yesterday! it’s not so very along ago, is it?”

“Oh, yesterday’s ball? I was admiring you.”

“Indeed; but I was not there.”

“Is it necessary for you to be present, Jane, for me to admire you; cannot one admire you in remembrance as truly as in person? and if, when absent, you triumph by comparison, the victory is only so much the greater.”

“I daresay, and it was in order to carry out the comparison to its utmost limits that you danced four times with Madame de Bonneuil; they are very pretty, are they not, those dark women who cover themselves with rouge, and have eyebrows like the Chinese mannikins on my screens and moustaches like a grenadier.”

“Do you know what we talked about during those four dances.”

“It is true then, that you danced four times with her?”

“It is true, no doubt, since you say so.”

“Is that a proper sort of answer?”

“What other could I give? could any one contradict what was said by so pretty a mouth? not I certainly, who would still bless it, even though it were pronouncing my sentence of death.”

And, as if to await this sentence, Thibault fell on his knees before the Countess, but at that moment, the door opened, and Lisette rushed in full of alarm.

“Ah! Monsieur, Monsieur,” she cried, “save yourself! here comes my master the Count!”

“The Count!” exclaimed the Countess.

“Yes, the Count in person, and his huntsman Lestocq, with him.”

“Impossible!”

“I assure you, Madame, Cramoisi saw them as plain as I see you; the poor fellow was quite pale with fright.”

“Ah! then the meet at Thury was all a pretence, a trap to catch me?”

“Who can tell, Madame? Alas! alas! men are such deceiving creatures!”

“What is to be done?” asked the Countess.

“Wait for the Count and kill him,” said Thibault resolutely, furious at again seeing his good fortune escaping from him, at losing what above all things it had been his ambition to possess.

“Kill him! kill the Count? are you mad, Raoul? No, no, you must fly, you must save yourself … Lisette! Lisette! take the Baron through my dressing-room. And in spite of his resistance, Lisette by dint of pushing got him safely away. Only just in time! steps were heard coming up the wide main staircase. The Countess, with a last word of love to the supposed Raoul, glided quickly in to her bedroom, while Thibault followed Lisette: She led him rapidly along the corridor, where Cramoisi was keeping guard at the other end; then into a room, and through this into another, and finally into a smaller one which led into a little tower; here, the fugitives came again on to a staircase corresponding with the one by which they had gone up, but when they reached the bottom they found the door locked. Lisette, with Thibault still following, went back up a few steps into a sort of office in which was a window looking over the garden; this she opened. It was only a few feet from the ground, and Thibault jumped out, landing safely below.

“You know where your horse is,” called Lisette, “jump on its back, and do not stop till you get to Vauparfond.”

Thibault would have liked to thank her for all her kindly warnings, but she was some six feet above him and he had no time to lose. A stride or two brought him to the clump of trees under which stood the little building which served as stable for his horse. But was the horse still there? He heard a neigh which reassured him: only the neigh sounded he thought more like a cry of pain. Thibault went in, put out his hand, felt the horse, gathered up the reins, and leaped on to its back without touching the stirrups; Thibault, as we have already said, had suddenly become a consummate horseman. But the horse no sooner felt the weight of the rider on its back than the poor beast began to totter on its legs. Thibault dug his spurs in savagely, and the horse made a
frantic effort to stand. But in another instant, uttering one of those pitiful neighs which Thibault had heard when he approached the stable, it rolled helplessly over on its side. Thibault quickly disengaged his leg from under the animal, which, as the poor thing struggled to rise, he had no difficulty in doing, and he found himself again on his feet. Then it became clear to him, that in order to prevent his escape, Monsieur le Comte de Mont-Gobert had hamstrung his horse.

Thibault uttered an oath: “If I ever meet you, Monsieur Comte de Mont-Gobert,” he said, “I swear that I will hamstring you, as you have hamstrung this poor beast.”

Then he rushed out of the little building, and remembering the way he had come, turned in the direction of the breach in the wall, and walking quickly towards it, found it, climbed over the stones, and was again outside the park. But his further passage was barred, for there in front of him was the figure of a man, who stood waiting, with a drawn sword in his hand. Thibault recognised the Comte de Mont-Gobert, the Comte de Mont-Gobert thought he recognised Raoul de Vauparfond.

“Draw, Baron!” said the Count; further explanation was unnecessary. Thibault, on his side, equally enraged at having the prey, on which he had already set tooth and claw, snatched away from him, was as ready to fight as the Count. He drew, not his sword, but his hunting-knife, and the two men crossed weapons.

Thibault, who was something of an adept at quarter-staff, had no idea of fencing; what was his surprise therefore, when he found, that he knew by instinct how to handle his weapon, and could parry and thrust according to all the rules of the art. He parried the first two or three of the Count’s blows with admirable skill.

“Ah, I heard, I remember,” muttered the Count between his clenched teeth, “that at the last match you rivalled Saint-Georges himself at the foils.”

Thibault had no conception who Saint-Georges might be, but he was conscious of a strength and elasticity of wrist, thanks to which he felt he might have rivalled the devil himself.

So far, he had only been on the defensive; but the Count having aimed one or two unsuccessful lunges at him, he saw his opportunity, struck out, and sent his knife clean through his adversary’s shoulder. The Count dropped his sword, tottered, and falling on to one knee, cried “Help, Lestocq!”

Thibault ought then to have sheathed his knife and fled; but, unfortunately, he remembered the oath he had taken as regards the Count, when he had found that his horse had been hamstrung. He slipped the sharp blade of his weapon under the bent knee and drew it towards him; the Count uttered a cry; but as Thibault rose from his stooping posture, he too felt a sharp pain between his shoulder-blades, followed by a sensation as of extreme cold over the chest, and finally the point of a weapon appeared above his right breast. Then he saw a loud of blood, and knew no more. Lestocq, called to his master’s aid as the latter fell, had run to the spot, and, as Thibault rose from hamstringing the Count, had seized that moment to dig his hunting knife into his back.

…to be continued.

Pride Month 2025: Story of the Day

The Queer Alchemy of Benvenuto Cellini: Desire, Scandal, and Self-Fashioning in Renaissance Florence

Benvenuto Cellini — sculptor, goldsmith, author, swordsman, and scandal — lived at the heart of Renaissance Florence with the fire of a man determined to be seen, remembered, and unruly. Best known for works like the Perseus with the Head of Medusa in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, Cellini left behind something even more provocative than bronze: a flamboyant, defensive, and vividly queer autobiography, perhaps unmatched in Renaissance literature.

In his Vita, written in prison and laced with bragging, brawls, and boldness, Cellini details sexual encounters, artistic triumphs, and accusations of sodomy, a word he resented for its social sting as he was repeatedly charged with it. The records are clear: Cellini was arrested several times for relationships with young male apprentices and models. He denied nothing, except the idea that he should be ashamed.

For Cellini, desire was part of his genius. His male lovers appear in the text as objects of affection, jealousy, and eroticism. But unlike Michelangelo’s veiled sonnets or Leonardo’s evasive silence, Cellini wrote directly, arrogantly, defiantly. He presented his queerness as part of the same alchemical force that allowed him to turn raw metal into mythic form. Scandal followed him, and he sculpted his identity in its shadow. In a society where homoerotic relationships were criminalised yet widely practised (especially in Florence, where it was practically a civic stereotype), Cellini didn’t attempt to “correct” his behaviour. He mythologised it. He cast himself not only in bronze, but in story — a man in love with men, in love with danger, in love with himself.

Diagrams: the power to tell a story (that might be fake)

I’m currently in Venice for the Architecture Biennale, and I stopped at the local Fondazione Prada for the current exhibition by AMO/OMA, more out of due diligence than anything. I confess I wasn’t expecting much. I was wrong, and I recommend this show to anybody who’s interested in the visual storytelling of data, whether abstract or geographical.

The monumental work features over 300 diagrams, spanning from the XII century onwards – if you think telling stories of numbers through pictures is somehow a contemporary thing, think again – and it focuses on the arbitrary, perfectly on point selection of 9 themes deemed urgent by the studio:

the Built Environment, showcasing architect’s efforts to deal with sustainability more than anything;Health, with a colorful selection of our effort to show and tell about the human body, some very ancient Arab texts getting the nervous system right, and infographics on how we’re managing to let our fellow humans die;Inequalities, a theme that’s theoretically central to the Triennale in Milan too, even if that one has a… somehow peculiar set of angles but I’ll write about it eventually;Migrations, a direct cause and consequence of the previous one, with some very interresting takes on both the contemporary and the previous centuries’ migrations, and the fundamental idea that migrations are natural and the only reason we’re still alive as a species;Environment, with winds and hurricanes and volcanos and our efforts to explain all of that;Resources, with direct ties to the previous theme and, unfortunately, an equally direct tie to the next one;War;Truth, starting from the general idea that we don’t have one, an idea clearly reflected by the peculiar and unique set up of the room;Value, possibly the main theme we associate with the visual display of data.0. The entrance room

The ground floor of the splendid palace hosting the Venice headquarters of Fondazione Prada hosts the introduction to the exhibtion, with diagrams on the displayed diagrams because we’re nerds but people at AMA/OMA are nerdier. The diagrams focus on the geography if origin, the kind of exhibit (original vs. reproduction), on the media type and scale. A feast for the eyes. I leave the possible insights up to you, as diagrams are always neutral, aren’t they?

1. Upstairs: diagrams are never neutral

It’s kind of refreshing to see the same topics appearing over and over again, even though this might be a confirmation bias on my behalf. And yet, we spoke about it many times in the last months and it appears more relevant than ever, in the age of generalist Artificial Intelligences which appears to be spitting thruths and in the era of fake news. The show compares diagrams, and their apparent neutrality, with words and the tool we use to weaponise them: rethorics. To the curators, structure and proximity in diagrams are comparable to what emphasis and exposition do in a discourse made of words, and yet the result is the same: both diagrams and words are storytelling, a narration aiming to sway the listener – or viewer – towards a certain opinion, a certain aspect of the truth. OMA, who has always used diagrams heavily in their design expositon, presents this aspect with absolute transparency and a candor I did not expect. I admit this is the panel that made me fall in kive with the exhibition, right next to the entrance of the upper floor, in a room so crowded with frescos you don’t even pay attention to them.

The main sector of the show is here, upstairs, weirdly organized between nine long tables in the central area – neatly lined up from 1 to 9 – and focus rooms scattered all over the place, based more on their size than their sequence. If you want to see the main table and then the corresponding focus room, I suggest you keep the map at hand: you can either take your own printed copy downstairs or be a good child and use your phone to fetch your digital copy from the QR code, or use the one I’m providing below. You’ll have some zigzagging to do.

1. The Built Environment

I’ll have to contradict myself and my previous statement, on this topic, as I found this room to be the most self-serving and least interesting focus on the nine. And since the focus is sustainability, the narrative being pushed here is that there’s a bunch of heroic archistars focusing on the theme starting from the XX century and for the first time in history. Don’t make me laugh. The interaction of buildings with natural elements such as air, light and sun was well known, before our own greed and onanistic approach to buildings caused the mess we’re currently trying to fix. Alas, as every student in architecture knows, everything that came before the XX century is to be considered quaint at best, irrelevant at most, if you want to be taken seriously. So here we are.

The focus room features some quaint schemes from the 1900s and 2000s, including a charming sketch by Wladimiro Acosta from 1943, but nothing more.

2. Health

Every single one of my students know you can’t study the importance of data visualisation without the aid of John Snow, and that’s John with an h, not the Game of Thrones dude. He was a surgeon who studied the diffusion of cholera in London during the 1854 epidemic, and he had the intuition of marking the number of deaths symbolically on a map. The knowledge and insight created was instantaneous: it became clear that deaths were pivoting around specific sources of public water, and sparing buildings which were relying on a different supply of water. The idea that water itself was spreading the diseas was considered ludicrous, back in the days. One of the first applications of what we’d call GIS a century later proved everybody wrong, and saved many lives.

The focus rooms abandons the geographic angle and concentrates on the different schematic depictions of the body, either as a machine or a symbolic entity, more governed by spiritual and supernatural forces. I think you know where I stand in this battle.

3. Inequalities

The topic is so ample it would need its own show. On, wait, there is one. In Milan. Curated by an archistar. And has a whole floor on bacteria. As I said, I’ll write about it another time. When I’ll have something better to drink.

This show decides to skim the surface of the topic and then dive deep into a specific kind of inequality, narrated by the work of William E.B. Du Bois (1868 – 1963). If you don’t know him, the guy was an American sociologist who promoted and organised a show on African-Anericans for the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris. The original display was made up of 63 diagrams hand-drawn in the Department for Social Study of the Atlanta University in Georgia, and they were meant to see how far the African-American community had managed to achieve in such a short span of time – slavery had been abolished in 1865 through the so-called 13th amendment – and how much they could still achieve. Unfortunately, many of the displayed inequalities still stand today, and the concept of the exhibition still stands. Things didn’t move as fast as Du Bois was hoping, but since he co-founded the NAACP civil rights movement in 1909, I think he was very clear on that.

4. Migrations

As I anticipated in the introduction, the exhibition’s angle on the topic is supremely interesting: that migrations are more than natural, and instrumental to our survival as a species.

The focus room is dedicated to the work of Philippe Rekacewicz, a geographer, cartographer and information designer author, amongst others, of the masterpiece Palestine-Israël: une histoire visuelle. His section is very thin, alas too thin, at the back of the displays on theme 3, and still I encourage you to take a look and ponder, consider the story that’s being told, and never take antyhing for granted.

5. Environment

From climate change to disaster analysis (and prediction), the focus room for this section presents three different, intertwined themes: the world, elements and calamities, while the main table displays enchanting pieces such as Harold N. Fisk’s map of the Mississipi’s alluvional basin and Matthew Fontaine Maury’s map of the so-called “trade winds” (the alisei), winds so crucial in the Atlantic Ocean that I would like to read an alternate history fiction that explores how the world would be shaped without those winds, so disgracefully instrumental to the slave trade.

6. Resources

If the linear narrative of the exhibition didn’t hit you before – and I’ll admit the connection between 1 and 2, and the rest of the themes isn’t that strong – by now you’ll come to realise that you aren’t following a fragmented narrative but all pieces are part of a singular story: ours. Inequalities flows into the Enrivonmental section on its tiptoes, maybe, but strikes back with a vengeance when it comes to resources, through the powerful work of Charles-Joseph Minard and a focus on food.

Minard was a guy who was doing our job back in the 50s. The 1850s. He was surveying and representing charts on the movement of goods and people, in a style that would create our flux diagrams. Goods were starting to be treated as troops during a military campaign, as trade wars started to be a thing, and therefore demanded a similar way of being represented: from coal to wheat, which leads us to the second focus section on food, a graphical representation aids us in understanding how everything is connected in this global economy of inequalities we’re upholding.

7. War

Naturally connected to plague and famine, as the Apocalypse tells us, strategies and the science behind recent and ancient wars have one thing in common: detachment. When you represent troops, and deaths, and people in general through the lens of a visual diagram, the operation becomes much more clear than it was when you were doing the same thing about migrations. The human side is completely lost on us, through the seemingly aseptic lens of the visual representation.

This room is probably the most complex one, tucked away in a corner of the building you can only reach through another room, and features monitors with visual aids for drone strikes, in which the abstraction of the human life couldn’t be more obvious. The narrative is paired with diagrams on the atomic bomb, least we forget where we’re headed.

8. Truth

War is connected to the concept of truth through a double tie, and that’s why I approve so much that this is the sibsequent section, instead of the previous one. Even if they’ll try to teach you otherwise, many wars and human acts of violence didn’t span from ideology, but came from economy, from the crusades to the Ukraine invasion, down to the holocaust. Then the narrative steps in. The distortion of truth in favour of a less crude perspective.

The focus room is divided into three topics: religion, astronomy, and history. Each of them shows our strife to try and tell the truth through pictures, numbers, and the manipulation of both.

9. Worth

As the focus of many of our analysis, it feels natural for money to close the exhibition and then yet its section feels like due diligence. I felt the curators were trying to tell us that, eventually, it all comes down to people and resources, and how they both interact with the built and natural environment. Least we do woth money the same thing we do with war: hide people behind figures. People who live, thrive, strive, and die.

Projects Failing Forward

I already spoke about the value of failing fast on projects; it’s not anything I invented, and yet our mindset always shifts towards trying to avoid failure. We try to build bulletproof workflows. We have a failsafe in place for everything. We craft The One Script To Rule Them All. We said that BIM means starting with the end in mind, and we believed it meant that everything needs to mapped, trialed and tested. If you’re familiar with ISO 19650-2, there’s a whole chapter on the preparation of a project, in which technological solutions are evaluated, environments are tested, meta-models are created and prototypes are built just to stress-test the systems.

And the unicorns fly: don’t forget about those.

Inevitably, there’s a moment in every project when something breaks. A workflow collapses. A brilliant idea unravels under scrutiny. A script that worked yesterday refuses to cooperate. Someone asks for a deliverable that reveals a critical gap in the plan. It’s a moment that feels, in the most literal sense, like the end of the world as we know it. And we don’t feel fine.

This guideline is for those of us who dread that moment; for students venturing into digital design and construction with big ideas and fragile prototypes, for peers navigating the uncertainty of innovation in environments where reliability is king and mistakes are costly, for everyone who has been told to “innovate” without being given permission to fail.

What follows isn’t a manual. It’s not a step-by-step guide to agile management or a summary of project delivery frameworks. It’s a lived reflection—a series of notes collected from the field, drawn from my experience as a digital consultant, workshop facilitator, and collaborator across teams that build, test, break, and rebuild things every day. Trust me, I know what it means to fail. I know what it means to fail early and I know what it means to fail late, when you’ve already invested all of yourself into the fucking project.

Preface: Failing Fast and Antifragility

In my previous reflections on antifragility in digital innovation, I made the case that digital workflows aren’t fragile—they’re iterative by design. They can absorb shocks, reconfigure themselves, and emerge stronger… if we let them. This post continues that line of thought, but from a more personal angle: what it means to work through failure, rather than around it, and why we need to build cultures and mindsets that make this possible.

“Failing forward” isn’t about failing for the sake of it. It’s about failing with purpose, in ways that allow us to learn, correct course, and build better things faster. It’s about embracing the risk that teaches us something before the stakes get too high. It’s about treating early setbacks not as signs of weakness, but as the raw material of eventual strength.

This is what I’ve learned—sometimes the hard way. And this is why, when things fall apart, I pay attention. There’s always something in the wreckage worth rebuilding.

Though the whole thing didn’t live up to my expectations, you go ahead and tell me this was not a suggestive shot1. Scene One: When It All Falls Apart1.1 A Personal Story: The Clash That Never Was

It starts like this every time.

We’re early in the design process. Maybe too early, depending on who you ask. I suggest we run a clash detection round. Not a full coordination session—not yet. Just a first pass, to test how the models are aligning.

The reactions are predictable.
“But our model’s not ready.”
“We’re still working on the main piping routes.”
“Surely it’s too soon.”
But it’s not too soon. That’s exactly the point.

Clash detection, in its purest form, isn’t just about finding collisions between walls and ducts. It’s about surfacing design misalignments. And you can’t do that when you have other problems in the way. You know, those small, minor things like discrepancies in coordinate systems, file origins, naming schemes, or level heights that accumulate like technical debt. If left unchecked, they turn every subsequent meeting into a blame game.

I’ve seen what happens when we wait to start with coordination. Models developed in different offices, sometimes even on different continents, come together for the first time too late. Each one is built with its own internal logic, each assuming its own version of “truth.” Even if the BIM execution plan was correctly transmitted to everyone, sometimes they even had a template file with the correct set up, and yet there’s always someone who thought Project North was going to look prettier the other way, someone who considered their origins would work better if shifted, people with their own grids and levels, and there’s always a studio who decided to raise the sea level.

There’s always one BIM Coordinator who decides to raise the sea level, and this is how I imagine them.

The result? The clash detection report is either empty, because systems can’t see each other, or it lights up with hundreds of so-called “errors”—none of which are meaningful collisions. They’re semantic misfires: grids that don’t line up, levels that don’t match. The data doesn’t know how to talk to itself.

And here’s the real danger: coordination stops before it even starts.

Instead of analysing the report, teams fall into defensive positions. “Our model is correct. The others need to fix theirs.” Meetings devolve into a semantic cold war, where no one is wrong, but everything is broken. What should have been an opportunity to align becomes a bureaucratic stalemate. The clash detection never actually happens.

1.2 The Resistance to Failure and the Shift That Matters

This, I’ve learned, is a resistance not just to technical misalignment, but to the idea of showing your work before it’s finished. It’s the instinct to protect what’s fragile, to delay exposure until the file is polished, safe, unassailable. I understand the impulse. After all, nobody wants their mistakes broadcast across a coordination report. But this is where the mindset has to shift.

If we treat early coordination as an exam, people will always wait to be perfect. If we treat it as a technical test, people will not commit to the process. We need to treat it as diagnostics, as routine as checking the oil before a long trip, then we can start to talk about why your pipes want to go through my walls.

What changes when you normalise “failing early” is precisely the kind of conversation you’re trying to kick-start with the whole clash detection thing. You no longer ask: “Who’s to blame?” You ask: “What needs aligning?” The clash detection becomes what it was always meant to be: not a tribunal, but a coordination starter. Revisions aren’t exams. They’re part of the rhythm. And technical problems are no longer threats—they’re signals that the system is working as it should.

When you build that kind of culture, failure stops being the end of a phase and starts being the engine of progress.

2. Diving Deeper: Why Failure Matters (Especially in Critical Projects)

In my experience, the more critical a project is – the tighter the schedule, the higher the budget, the more eyes watching – the less willing teams are to make room for failure. That’s logical. And yet, that’s a paradox we need to disband.

We know these are the projects that require the most rigorous coordination, the strongest collaboration, the clearest standards. And yet these are the environments where people are most reluctant to admit uncertainty, to expose partial work, or to raise red flags too early. The stakes are too high. Or so it feels.

2.1 The Paradox of Risk-Aversion

In high-stakes settings and for high-end professionals, there’s a tendency to conflate perfectionism with professionalism. We think that if we delay exposing the work until it’s perfect, we’re protecting the project from risk. In fact, we’re doing the opposite. Every unspoken assumption, every unchecked convention, every undocumented deviation from the standard—it all piles up in the shadows. And because no one wants to fail “in public,” errors stay hidden until they’re baked too deeply into the system to be easily resolved.

What begins as a protective instinct becomes a structural vulnerability.

In digital workflows, risk is front-loaded or back-loaded, never eliminated. And the longer you wait, the more expensive it gets. Failure postponed is just failure with compound interest.

See here for instance2.2 Early Mistakes, Stronger Systems

Digital projects thrive when they’re built for iteration, not preservation. Early mistakes—when surfaced and addressed—don’t just prevent bigger failures later; they actively strengthen the system. Think of it like stress testing.

When a model misaligns with a coordinate system or a naming convention causes a false clash, that’s a stress point. You can patch it, or you can refactor the logic that created the mismatch in the first place. The latter is harder, but it’s how your workflows mature. Over time, this becomes a form of antifragility: your process doesn’t just survive shocks, it adapts. You start building templates that avoid the same pitfalls. You write documentation not to defend your work, but to help others succeed. You design standards that are flexible enough to catch edge cases. In short, you create a system that’s more robust because it has been tested by small, early, survivable failures.

2.3 Emotional Resilience and Team Safety

But there’s another layer, arguably more important than the technical one.

Teams that operate in cultures of fear and defensiveness – where the first error becomes a trial, and feedback feels like judgment – will never raise problems early. They’ll bury them, delay them, work around them until the deadline makes confrontation unavoidable. It’s a concept we explore in connection to DevOps (see here, for instance).

By contrast, teams that treat mistakes as expected, normal, and worthy of discussion develop a very different kind of resilience. They can absorb shocks, they recover faster, and they fucking talk to each other.

Psychological safety isn’t a luxury; it’s infrastructure. It’s what allows a team to bring forward difficult truths. To say, “This model doesn’t work.” To ask, “Can we try something different?” To admit, “We made a wrong assumption back there.” When failing forward becomes the norm, you replace the performance of perfection with the practice of progress. In critical projects, that’s not a compromise: it’s the only way through.

3. Guiding Principles for Failing Better

Failing forward is not just an attitude; it’s a design strategy. But like any strategy, it needs structure. Over time, I’ve come to rely on a few principles that help teams move from the abstract idea of “learning from failure” to the concrete mechanics of failing well.

These aren’t commandments. They’re orientation tools. A way to stay grounded when the work gets messy… which it always does.

3.1. Frame Failure as Feedback

The first, and maybe the most important, is this: failure is feedback. Nothing more, nothing less.

When we stop framing errors as moral failings or intellectual weaknesses, they become what they’ve always been: data. A failed export tells you something about a misaligned naming convention. A broken script flags an unanticipated edge case. A confusing coordination meeting? That’s feedback too: maybe your documentation isn’t as clear as you thought.

If you frame mistakes as diagnostic tools, your instinct shifts from defensiveness to curiosity. The question isn’t “Who messed up?” It’s “What is this telling us?”

3.2. Create Low-Cost Tests

In workshop environments, I always encourage teams to build the smallest thing that can fail. Not the full solution. Not a beautiful model. Just a sliver – a structural detail, a naming protocol, a file exchange -that tests the critical assumptions of the workflow.

The earlier and cheaper your tests, the less painful your pivots.

And that’s the goal: fail small so you can pivot big. Test alignment early. Build standards collaboratively. Prototype naming conventions before enforcing them. Break the system gently and often, so it can evolve into something resilient.

This isn’t inefficiency. It’s strategic agility.

3.3 Cultivate a Culture of Transparency

No principle works in isolation: failing better depends on culture. If the team believes that failure will be punished – or worse, ignored – they’ll hide it. And what’s hidden doesn’t get fixed.

If you can cultivate a space where people feel safe sharing broken files, awkward questions, and ugly first drafts, something else starts to happen. Knowledge flows. Assumptions surface. Friction becomes creative tension, not interpersonal conflict.

That kind of transparency isn’t automatic. It needs modelling. It starts with leaders saying, “I missed something here,” or “This didn’t work the way I thought it would.” It needs rituals: post-mortems, shared folders of lessons learned, permission to be unfinished.

Revisions aren’t a sign you got it wrong. They’re a sign the work is alive.

Closing Thoughts: Fail, Archive, Repeat

If there’s one habit that’s helped me the most – more than any software, workflow, or framework – it’s this: I keep a failure repository. And trust me, it’s plumpy.

Not a shame file. Not a graveyard of broken things. An archive: something structured, alive, itemised. A place where I collect the clash reports that triggered three weeks of debate, screenshots of errors I didn’t understand at the time, models that failed spectacularly because someone (usually me) assumed “the others would follow the standard,” e-mails of people triggering weeks of crisis with clients and suppliers.

It’s not about self-flagellation. It’s about memory.

Because the truth is: failure fades, or at least I hope it does for you. If it doesn’t, it’s called trauma, and that’s a conversation for another time. When memory fades, we lose what it taught us; we forget how long it took to align those levels, why we standardised naming protocols in the first place, or what that terrible export bug revealed about our assumptions.

But when you archive the story of a failure – not just the fact that it happened, but what it changed – it becomes part of your institutional wisdom. It gives the next person (or the next version of you) a head start. More importantly, it reframes the narrative. What didn’t work isn’t a footnote or a source of embarrassment. It’s the precondition for what eventually did. It’s part of the creative residue of the project.

If you’re working digitally, iteratively, collaboratively, you’re not failing if you’re adjusting. You’re not behind if you’re learning. You’re not unprofessional if you’re willing to share the parts that didn’t go as planned.

This isn’t a post about getting it right. It’s a post about getting it better and the messy, revision-filled, emotionally complex process that takes us there. And if we can learn to celebrate the parts of the process that fall apart, we might just start building things that hold up even better.

So fail. Archive. Repeat. That’s the loop. That’s the craft.